The pharmacy aisle had collapsed in on itself. Copper sighed. It may have been easier to go to the shopping centre. There were four pharmacies there. It’s also a little closer to home.
In this lifeless world, shopping centres depressed her. The soulless corporate decor and escalators never worked. They should be teeming with people. Instead, they are lifeless museums to consumerism.
She often found, once you have seen one shopping centre, you have seen a mall.
The vegetable aisle was empty. The worst reminder of the lack of life. Everything had rotted back at the start, devoured by insects. Empty trays remained with seeds and pips left at the bottom.
Copper had tried to grow some vegetables. The only success she had ever had was beetroot. One had grown before the drought had come. She wanted to see how big she could get it.
It was a lazy plant. The beet grew to barely a mouthful. Then the taproots growth stopped.
She recalled stepping out of her front door one day and finding it uprooted, laying on her steps with a knife sticking out of it.
Super sorry if you’ve been getting notifications of old posts being published today everyone.
Went a bit mad this week as repair work on the website, post WordPress 5.0 update came to demotivated stand still. An hour or two a day of repairs until March wasn’t working for me. So I just spent the last three days working on repairing as much as I could. I’m 45 hours into repairs. About 5 more hours of repairs to go I think. Found a stack of extra problems with the Gutenberg import.
Also found if I drafted an old post then set it to published again it sent out a publication notice to every channel, email and social media with no option of not doing so. The usual bit you publish that has options to share to all social networks was actually greyed out. How silly is that. I published a few posts before realising they were appearing on my Twitter and Tumblr and people were leaving comments on the blog like they were new posts.
Pretty livid about the whole thing but the bulk of the work is done now. Crack a beer open with me and cheer as it means I’m going to have more time than expected to work on new Fears.
Cheers for sticking with me as always everyone. I’m so glad you all still enjoy a smidgeon of fear-filled humour every morning, with me, here. Have a great Sunday everyone!
Copper pushed her
way past a collapsed shelf. Entering the meat aisle, a renewed sense
of dread washed over her.
All of the meat had
rotted away long ago. Picked clean bones remained. She could remember
swarms of flies filling the fridges. A dull, black carrion hum. The
thought of flies bartering with each other over meat, where to eat
and where to lay eggs. Hideous tiny pests, a gross thought.
But then flies who bartered with fruit and vegetables? Grocer.
She’d cleaned the hardware shop out of sealant years ago, but petroleum jelly from the supermarket would work in some cases.
As Copper arrived, she noted that the front doors had been opened since she was last here. Could be a sign of life or an effect of last nights storm.
The left side of the
building had collapsed a few months back. Noises would occasionally
rattle out from the rubble, packets of food rustling, or possibly
ghosts. Imagination could be a saviour or curse in times like these.
Copper would often fun to imagine she was a ghost hunter. She’d have to stay fit as a ghost hunter. Just a little exorcise.
Copper cut the last
bean can into shape. She pressed it down over the hole in the wall.
Driving screws into place and applying the last of the sealant to
avoid more dust coming in.
She looked across
the street. The windows at number thirty-four had blown in overnight.
The curtains swayed gently in the breeze. As the wind picked up and
died down, a random melody came from inside. Notes would play as each
gust blew through the empty house. The tune made Copper think of a
jazz musician playing the flute.
She also wondered if this would count as house music.
She offered an apple
out to the mechanical creature.
“Click, click,
whir,” came the reply without a bite.
“Oh, I don’t
know,” she sighed. “She just left you with me and told me to keep
you fed. I mean what the bloody ‘eck do I feed a clockwork lizard!”
She wandered into the kitchen to continue preparing her apple pie.
“It’s not easy you know, she’s so random! And shes got all this weird stuff. You’re about the least weird thing she’s given me”, she mused as he dropped in the apples, syrup, brown sugar and drop of oil into the beaten copper pan
She ambled back into
the room and stood to face the metal lizard.
CHOMP!
She looked down at
what remained of the copper pans handle.
Sometimes you’ve got to tell the story you want to tell, even if you’re not sure it’s going to work. I’ve had that struggle with Brass, a post-apocalyptic road trip featuring two new Fears, Copper and Iron. A blend of horror and humour. The entire story is just over ninety stories long forming one continuous narrative.
I’ve been pondering on whether or not to publish this story online since August last year when I’d told the first of Lily and Sally’s Lost Leads stories. A thirty tale long narrative felt like the limit for an attention span on the Internet. Five stories a week would mean if I started today the story wouldn’t finish until June. Could the Little Fears focus on one story for that long? Heck, could I?
So the stories, sat, languished, and niggled. I want to tell the story, but I don’t feel it would work on the net.
Until this weekend…
My Internet friend and fellow blogger Lauren bought Copper and Iron as a print after my Etsy overhaul the other day. (You can visit her website HERE and my Etsy store HERE. Wink, wink.)
To quote Lauren:
“I just really liked their dynamic… something about em really appealed to me.”
Me too, Lauren. She pulled me back to their story. I gave it a few read-overs and figured if I re-wrote about 40% of it and loosened off the connection between each days tale, I could tell their tales in my daily horror and pun format. It’s a big job, but, well, sometimes you just have to tell the story you want to tell.
It helps that I’m hoping to have my entire website fixed post-Gutenberg/WordPress 5.0 update by the end of February. Then I can rework the front page and side-bar with links to each complete story. Grey Moon, Seeking Hydra, Lost Leeds, Capricorn, January and of course, Brass. That’ll certainly make navigating my site easier. I’m not sure if I’ll stick with the current theme, but eh, can figure that out when the website’s been fully repaired.
So, thanks to Lauren for prompting me to return to Copper and Irons story. Thanks to Warren for the $10 Patronage. And thank you to everyone else for the continued support!
“She takes the
stairs, every single time man,” cried Spectre.
“It’s just one
of those things,” sighed Sprite.
“Yeah,” groaned
Spectre. “But I always prefer the escalators.”
“Bruv, I don’t mean to sound rude,” said Sprite. “But maybe you were just raised differently.”
Trivia. A fear of slopes or stairs is called bathmophobia. I wonder if there’s a really scared person somewhere naming all the different fears and phobias in the world…
She watched the roots, reaching up out of the ground. Twirling around each other. Tying themselves together and standing tall. She would have run when she saw her face forming in the organic ballet. If only the roots holding her hands and feet would loosen their grip.
Ya know, I was absolutely certain I’d had Durthi as a #Colour_Collective portrait. Can’t find her in any of the usual folders or my Twatter though. I shall remedy this in 2019.
Obs, this ain’t just no straight-up horror post, but an advert too. Cause ya know, I do need a few quid to buy tea!
You can get an original hand drawn Durthi or a print of this fiendish plant lady on my Etsy store. Postage is free and first class wherever you live in the world, and each card envelope comes with a free bird drawn on it. Stick that in ya stovepipe and smoke it.
Little Fears 